qiqqa and pdfs

ghisht

I stumbled across this program today. It has a lot of features that many zotero users are asking for regarding pdf support, etc.
www.qiqqa.com

Just a dream, but it would be wonderful if zotero could be integrated with a program like this one. As Zotero becomes a standalone program, qiqqa might be a possible platform with which pdf annotation, etc. could build on?

Have any of you used this program? It looks very powerful.

kithairon

Love the idea of the feature to 'report on all notes' of a chosen group of documents...
Skim (Mac only) does a great job on pdf annotation and can export passages highlighted and/or text annotations as separate text file but only on individual document basis.

adamsmith

in general this might be nice - although I think considering the necessary resources and pdf integration in Zotero would need to yield major advantages over just using a good plugin such as Skim, FoxIt or pdfXchange.

quiqqa in particular is neither open source nor available for Mac or Linux (and it doesn't look like they're even considering a version for the latter) so I don't think it's a good match for Zotero. I also don't see it looking much more powerful than Zotero with ZoteroQuickLook plugin (admittedly that doesn't seem to work well on Windows yet, but seems to be coming along).

jamesjardine

Hiya,

It's Jimme here. I am the guy building Qiqqa.

Qiqqa is not trying to be a reference manager like Zotero or Mendeley. As I do my PhD I am building something that is excellent at helping me (any anyone else who wants to use it) READ, UNDERSTAND and DIGEST the papers in my library using Computational Linguistics techniques, and not LOCATE/DOWNLOAD/COLLECT the papers.

Zotero's incredible strength lies with its ability to download reference matter from hundreds of sources - and that is something Qiqqa would never need to compete against. It is great to see a community at work writing the hundreds of parsers and scrapers of the various online libraries.

I would be more than happy to add an importer into Qiqqa from Zotero. I guess the simplest route could be to augment the zotero bibtex output format to include any attached files (much like Mendeley does in the file={} field).

To get references from Zotero into Qiqqa would then be as simple as exporting and importing. Qiqqa already has the option to overwrite the info in Qiqqa with any metadata that is in the import file. And it avoids duplicate PDF records.

Another option will be for me to go directly into the Zotero database - but I think the reuse of the Bibtex export benefits everyone (not just Qiqqa). If there is enough support, I would be happy to add to the Bibtex exporter?

Cheers, and have a great rest of weekend!
Jimme

jimme@qiqqa.com or www.qiqqa.com

jmurimbo

you can happily annotate (highlight, underline, add comments, etc.) pdf files in zotero if you ditch adobe acrobat and switch to another pdf reader. personally, i prefer Foxit Reader, but here are a number of good freeware pdf readers available.

there is a little trick to removing adobe reader from firefox if you already have it installed that i'd be happy to show if anyone is interested. alternatively, you can just right-click on the pdf file and select open in external viewer.

trisquirrelon

okay did I get it right that I need an external pdf reader like Foxit to store my annotations of a lengthy document right before asking Zotero to add the document to the library avoiding the redundant step of first saving it, then annotating it via Acrobat`s reader and adding it again for keeping a file with annotations (highlithings of paragraphs for e.g.)?

adamsmith

Zotero saves pdf files as they are. If the annotations are saved as part of the pdf - as the are in most pdf handlers, including Foxit, Acrobat, pdfXchange, and preview - it doesn't matter at what point you actually add the annotations.

Acrobat reader doesn't annotate, though - only the for-(hefty)-pay editions do. And not all of these have working plugins for Firefox, which is part of what this thread is about.

Heckscher

ZotFile (which has its own discussion in this forum) extracts annotations and puts them into a note in the Zotero record, which is very handy. Qiqqa seems to do some additonal analyses: automatic OCR, tagging, maybe some relational analyses (I haven't used it myself).